


The Island of Doctor Zola

by TokyoDarjeeling



Series: Arlington [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Arlington Cemetery, Gen, H.G. Wells - Freeform, So it's like songfic but with novels from lit class, The Island of Doctor Moreau
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 13:05:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2270790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TokyoDarjeeling/pseuds/TokyoDarjeeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arlington Cemetery, early June. It is green and there is white. There isn't anything but gravestones, some folding likes waves but they aren't waves. They are stones, on land.</p><p>“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The Winter Soldier had happened to go under. That was all the difference.”</p><p>The Asset searches for Bucky Barnes, inspired by The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Island of Doctor Zola

The rocks folded like waves, over and on top of each other, falling down on the next one, and the next, folding like domino pieces, like crumbling buildings, like hills during a mudslide. They fell like grave stones fall, with finality and ending.

Arlington Cemetery, early June. It is green and there is white. There isn't anything but gravestones, some folding likes waves but they aren't waves. They are stones, on land.

He could not remember if Bucky ever knew how to swim. He was unsure if the Asset knew, probably, but swimming with a heavy metal arm was most likely advised against. Self-preservation was advised instead. Yet the Asset had swam, or had it been Bucky. He swam in that river, dove even, swam up to the surface, dragged to shore the man who fell. The other falling man, who wasn't him. He did that, whether it was the Asset or Bucky, both or neither.

You cannot swim in Arlington for there is no water. There were sections with individually shaped stones, and sections with monuments and memorials and never-dying flames. But the biggest sections, the ones he felt the most comfortable in, were evenly shaped rows of slabs of rock – marble maybe? How does one tell? They rolled over him like waves, comforting, safe, not drowning.

He wanders around the enormous area for three days without a map or guidance. Processing, not remembering. On the Tuesday, he searches out a directory, with a list of names. No longer than the number of stones among the waves. He searches. He finds.

Sergeant James Barnes, 32557038. He finds the place, he finds the rock. And there he stays.

*

_“'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own. After all, what is ten years? Man has been a hundred thousand in the making.'”_

Doctor Zola did never care much for pain. It was an obstacle in his race for wonders. It needed to be obliterated. Sometimes, that need caused conflicting behavior; a kind word, a promise, the painting of dreams, reassurance. It was always unnatural to him, because by default it defeated the purpose he was serving: the antidote for pain served the very animal he wanted to obliterate. Yet again and again he digressed from his code, for a means of persuasion was needed, and every time as he broke yet another promise, yet another vow, he felt a small sense of content in that maybe it was worth it. What is a small setback in a long art process? What is a decade of lies, in a century of dishonesty?

Then came Pierce. He had a different take on things.

_“'So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.'”_

He understood. He knew what had to be done, and why, and he agreed. Alexander Pierce was not a doctor, not a scientist, he was a soldier first and foremost, and an American, but he had a drive and a passion. Zola could work with him, and even if he would not, would not ever, accept natural demise and the abandonment of his work, he could confidently leave the Winter Soldier in Pierce's hands and know instinctively that the work would be finished with perfection.

_“'Then with men, the more intelligent they become the more intelligently they will need the goad to keep them out of danger. I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.'”_

Pierce would make the Winter Solider not feel pain. He would drive evolution onward, quicker. That was how the world was spinning these days, quicker, and with the Winter Soldier, Pierce would continue shaping the century. He would not simply beat the animal out, or coax it into submission, he would replace it, with the intelligence that would, ultimately, make pain needless. It would be ground out of existence and the Winter Soldier would be not a revolution, just the next step in evolution.

*

_“'But,' said I, 'I still don't understand. Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain?'”_

Between the wipes, memories were made and they were now coming back to him, rolling like waves, broken by rocks so as not to out power him. He had wondered, like Bucky had wondered, like the Asset had not, what the purpose was. What was the point? He, whoever and however he was, stopped bothering with defenses and justification, disregarding it like he disregarded compassion and empathy. It happened, it would continue to happen: the pain, the experiments, the wipes, the creation.

But the purpose? For why this was created? He did not really fully comprehend, ever. He could not tell how long time or how many years passed between him and Zola, him and Pierce, yet he had a vague appreciation of their patience in the creation process. But he did not understand, not now, and most likely not ever. It was not in his nature, and he wondered if that was the way Bucky had been or the way the Asset had been made?

_“I say I became habituated to the Beast People, so that a thousand things that had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me.”_

One thing was new though, being this being that was now, standing amidst the rocks. He wondered and he questioned and the slab of mayhap marble did not respond. What do you think, James? it seemed to ask of him.

_“I suppose everything in existence takes its color from the average hue of our surroundings: Pierce and Zola were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined.”_

Humans. How to be one of them, if he could not continue on being an Asset? And he could not, for the people he had been an Asset to were gone.

Bucky Barnes was not gone. He was right here, in front him, like he had been at the museum exhibit. Bucky Barnes was real and he was here, even if no bones of his rested under the grass before the stone. The bones stood still, stood above the grass before the stone. They had come home now.

To the end of the line.

There was so many stones around him. Row after row, hill after hill. So many soldiers who saw too few winters, instead of too many, like him. He should be here too. Steve Rogers was real and he should be here, it had simply been too long for him not to. But he wasn't. He had been on that bridge, like he had, when none of them should. Steve Rogers should have been here and he had, in a way, been.

That time he looked Sergeant James Barnes up in the directory, he also looked up Captain Steve Rogers. There had been no listing, but some sentences, informing him that his headstone and memorial had been removed after his re-discovery. Captain Rogers had not come back to life, because he had never died at all, he was just sleeping. Sergeant Barnes had just had night terrors.

The other men and women around him now weren't sleeping, they were dead. So many of them, and increasing, day by day. He had watched many funerals during his time at Arlington, seen the folded flags and the hurting families, read the names on the new stones. So many were identical, some were less; they were, so many.

_“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The Winter Soldier had happened to go under. That was all the difference.”_

Maybe they weren't so different after all. Those who were here, and those who were not.

He wondered if _he_ thought so too. If _he_ had come to that conclusion, or if _he_ had always thought that _they_ were alike. Back when _they_ were kids in Brooklyn, when _they_ were soldiers in the army, when _he_ was a hero and he... he was not.

What did _he_ think, that first time again, when _he_ recognized someone the Asset had forgot, when _he_ was a man on a bridge, speaking a name? Or the second time, high up in the air, when _he_ and that name had been wiped away once again, and when the Asset almost, so very very almost, killed _him_ , what did _he_ think then?

_“It may seem a strange contradiction in me – I cannot explain the fact – but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity.”_

What would _he_ think, when they met again? Surely they would. Regardless of whose memory it was, he remembered vividly that that stupid kid from Brooklyn was incapable of backing down from a fight, even if it was one _he_ had surrendered in previously.

Steve Rogers would not back down until this stone right here, James Buchanan Barnes' stone, had fallen down so that, whoever he was post-Bucky, post-Asset, could take that name back, could take that life back and wake up. Wake up, Bucky, wake up.

 _He_ never said that, on the bridge, on the helicarrier. _He_ said other things, which made him remember. Yet the voice was still so clear when it whispered, shouted, cried, wake up, wake up, wake up. It was over, it could be over.

_”The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice.”_

He sat down, put his knees on the grass, his forehead on the stone. He listened.

_“Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe – I have thought since – I could have stood it well enough.”_

It was loud, but it wasn't bothersome. He didn't want it to stop. Not like Zola's voice, or Pierce's, or the countless others who had been close by, watching, saying everything and nothing. Not like the voices of all the victims, all the perpetrators. Like screams, cries and orders usually were. All those voices he had desperately wanted to shut out, the ones who weren't silenced for anything, until he came to Arlington. Among the waves, there was only one voice. Against the stone, only one.

_“It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.”_

And he wanted to listen, he wanted to listen to him, and no one else. That would suffice. It would suffice, through other voices and other people, and other pains. So much pain that had been stripped off him, wiped from him, inflicted on him, inflicted by him. So much pain of Zola's, of Pierce's. So much animal, and so much man.

_“They may once have been animals. But never before did I see an animal trying to think.”_

There were many thoughts in Arlington too. More than there had been in a long time, or maybe ever. Thoughts of the past and future, which were the most common. The past, that had always existed. The other two? Not so much. But they were here now, the past, the future, and the thought of them. There were the stones, and the people, and there was Steve, even though there wasn't.

And _he_ would not be here either, not for a long time, unless _he_ found him here. Or elsewhere, it did not matter, as long as he was found. Until then, the quiet and the voice would do. It would do to be alone again, to be one again.

_“There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.”_

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote an essay on The Island of Doctor Moreau for a class on animals in literature in April, in the heaviest post-CATWS fog, and couldn't help but think of Bucky during so many passages. Months later it turned into this angsty thing, also featuring my fascination for Arlington Cemetery. 
> 
> Thanks to Hanna and Sofia for betaing (tears were shed; dogs were consulted), this is all your fault anyway. 
> 
> All quotes are straight from the book, save for name changes, and the novel comes highly recommended!
> 
> I'd also like to direct everyone to crowthis's amazing art of Bucky at Arlington, which helped me to finally finish this fic: http://crowthis.tumblr.com/post/96146191070/visiting


End file.
